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Is anybody here interested in working on a UNIX System 6 port (the kernel from the Lions Book) from the groundup for the i386 architecture?

This port would include everything, including a VM subsystem addition, filesystems to read FAT16/32, and native UNIX filesystems, as well as drivers for the PC architecture, such as hard disk drivers, floppy drivers, video card drivers, etc, etc.

The basic port would consist of the kernel itself, plus the drivers, etc, shell, etc, and then later on, additional utilities could be ported to run with the operating system.

This is more for nostalgia than for the introduction of novel ideas, as I think it would be really cool to port one of the most innovative operating systems from early years to the 386 architecture.

The kernel would take a fair amount of work to port it, as it was designed without paging systems, etc, in mind, and that subsystem would basically have to be written from scratch. All the drivers would have to be written as well.

Let me know what everyone thinks.

Anybody going to offer any feedback, or just read it?

well, this sounds like a lot of work. You would basically be tearing out all the kernel gut and recplacing it with i386 code. You'd introducing paging an VM, which aren't native to it? Might as well just make a new kernel and drivers and call it system 6.

What kind of drivers would you port? You could use code from my NanoCore project if you'd like, as basecode maybe. One project is already using an ealier codebase of HALfix. HALfix is still very young, but if you need some help, go ahead and grab the code. I have no license for it yet, except 1 rule: you must have the line /* Code Based from the HALFix NanoCore project in full or part */ at the top of each file that uses any HALfix code.

Doesn't mean you'll use it, but i'm offering it

Regards,
mr. xsism

Thanks mr. xsism.

Yup, there is a fair amount of code that just needs to basically be scrapped from the System 6 kernel, including the memory management stuff in its entirety, as well as some machine specific stuff from the kernel as well, but it's good to use as a base to port from. I'm interested in VM management systems, so this is more to work on VM ideas than anything.

But, apparently, ports of this kind are single person, and I'll probably have to work on it myself. I'll post up my progress periodically, and some disk images to boot it up as well, including source code, in case anyone wants to play around with it.